Poet Danez Smith

“This is an easy place to be an artist,” says homegrown poet Danez Smith

The most irritating new cliché is that the present catastrophes will lead to great art—so how are we to react when the cliché comes to pass? That’s what I thought on reading Danez Smith’s stunning poem “not an elegy,” which is about—and also beyond—the epidemic of police shootings.

i am sick of writing this poem

but bring the boy. his new name

his same old body. ordinary, black

dead thing. bring him & we will mourn

until we forget what we are mourning.

is that what being black is about?

not the joy of it, but the feeling

you get when you are looking

at your child, turn your head

then, poof, no more child.

that feeling. that’s black. Smith is 28, and his new book is a revelation. This might have been expected. He has already won major awards for someone so young: the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, for instance. He’s already received fellowships from the NEA, the McKnight Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, though, is remarkable. It’s just out from Graywolf Press, called Don’t Call Us Dead, and is all the things poetry ought to be but rarely grasps—heartbreaking, funny, sorrowful,surprising.

Smith grew up in the Selby-Dale neighborhood of St. Paul, an only child of a single mother. His poem “summer, somewhere” speaks to that time:

. . . we tiny teethed brown beasts

of corner stores, fingers always

dusted cheeto gold. do you remember

those yellow months? our calves burned

all day biking each other around on pegs

taking turns being steed & warrior

He went to Central High School and worked at a Frattallone’s Ace Hardware in the summers (“I’m handy,” he says). He got his start writing and performing in the same Central Touring Theatre program that produced the comic Nick Swardson and writers for television shows Key & Peele and Parks and Recreation.

“We were writing monologues at the same time slam poetry was becoming large,” Smith tells me, over shrimp and yam fritters at Quang Restaurant, one of his favorite local spots. “And I liked performing. The message of poems shook me—I didn’t know you could speak back to the world like that.” Speak back he did, and so well he quickly became a keystone of the teenage St. Paul slam poetry scene, flown to San Francisco at 15 as part of a group of Minnesota youth poets, carrying around a notebook and learning “that poetry wasn’t just some weird thing a couple of us did—there was a world.”

It was a world that took notice: A performance of Smith’s “Dear White America” on YouTube has to date racked up more than 300,000 views. He left the Twin Cities for college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and later, at 24, discovered he was HIV positive. (Smith’s poem “fear of needles,” in full: “instead of getting tested/you take a blade to your palm/hold your ear to the wound.”) Needless to say, Smith also grew up in a world of police killings of black men. These twin strains of death— police and disease—are the iron anchor to Smith’s work, but the wit and flashing agility of language are what make these boats float, so to speak, and what make them the opposite of cliché. His poetry seethes with originality.

What’s it like to be a 28-year-old rising star of poetry in Minneapolis? Smith says he likes to keep his days pretty loose and quiet so he can work. He writes longhand in pencil on a big artist’s sketch pad in his apartment. He meets his friends at Quang—friends such as the Coffee House Press poet Hieu Minh Nguyen and Tish Jones, founder of TruArtSpeaks. (Is this the new Minneapolis answer to Virginia Woolf’s poetry set, the Bloomsbury Group?) Smith also goes to the gym, he goes to Spyhouse or Five Watt for coffee, he goes to his mom’s and aunts’ houses in St. Paul for Sunday suppers, and he goes, as perhaps a Minneapolis poet must, to Target.

“This is an easy place to be an artist,” says Smith of the Twin Cities. “There’s a respect for art here you don’t find everywhere. There’s the rich theater community, the great music scene, the museums—and it’s diverse, if you look. You can’t afford to live in San Francisco as a poet. I’m very particular about where I can live. I hate New York. I’m a real Minnesotan. When I feel like traveling, I can and I do, but I’ve left, and I didn’t like it.” He likes it here, where he can give the present catastrophes, and the past ones, his own voice and shape.

imagine a tulip, upon seeing a garden full of tulips, sheds its petals in disgust, prays some bee will bring its pollen to a rose bush. imagine shadows longing for a room with light in every direction. You look in the mirror & see a man you refuse to love. small child sleeping near Clorox, dreaming of soap suds & milk, if no one has told you, you are beautiful & lovable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am i.

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Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl was born in New York City little aware of her destiny—to eat out a lot in Minnesota. Dara is the other half of our star food and dining team, working side by side with Stephanie March.